How does formatting for blacked-out text work? There's nothing vital that needs to be blacked out (and yes, I made sure not to black anything out in the Containment Procedures) but it would be a Good Thing to Know and I'm stuck.

This draft of yours has clinical down very well along with an excellent grasp of formatting. As a first SCP attempt, I would say that this is good practice!

However, the core concept of this anomaly is exceedingly simple and not altogether an effective foundation for an SCP article. It lacks emotional punch and intrigue, and it evokes little to no pathos. I would advise you to start fresh: take some new ideas to the Brainstorming forum and really develop them before you write a new draft.

You should know what your objective for an SCP as an author is before you start writing it. A sense of awe, eeriness, sadness? Think about what you want the audience to take away from the experience of reading your article.

As Roget put it so eloquently in his SCP Writing Walkthrough, SCPs are stories first and foremost. The goal of a story is to draw an emotional response from the reader — whether that emotion is horror, wonder, amusement, etc. doesn't matter. When a concept by itself isn't enough to get that emotional response, an SCP can often accomplish the task through a narrative/story.

You can check out some more Series IV stuff to get an idea of how to communicate a good narrative through a clinical article. Here are some of my favorites:

SCP-XXXX requires a constant loop of the song “Heretic Pride” to be played at leasta minimum of 40 dB in volume. The song canmay be played from any device as long asthe entire songits entirety is played from beginning to end at least once, and the period of containment begins the moment the song begins to play.. SCP-XXXX is considered safely contained after 10 seconds of this audio stimulation.

Edited for improved clinical tone and clarity.

"Requires… played" is a more casual, conversational grammatical structure in comparison to the formal alternative: "Requires… to be played".

You used "at least" twice in close proximity, which makes for a bit of a boring read. Additionally, "minimum" is probably your better, more professional-sounding option. Try googling synonyms for phrases that you find yourself overusing. It helps me tons.

"Song" is a noun that gets used rather excessively in the excerpt above. One of the changes I suggested was to make it the antecedent of the pronoun "its". Don't be afraid of using pronouns and other epithets so long as the meaning stays clear.

Description:

SCP-XXXX is a semi-realistic plaster statue of a 12-point buck exactly fifteen hands tall. There areIt possesses no anomalous physical or chemical properties. When the statue is intact, it has the capacity to move under its own power as if it were a real deerin the manner of a live animal. It also becomes a dangerous cognitohazard, convincing human subjects that it is capable of speech despite the fact that no sounds have been heardrecorded from SCP-XXXX since capture. The voiceaudio hallucination induced by the cognitohazard resembles someone with whom the subject knowsis familiar and specifically pleads to be left alone.

Edited for improved clinical tone.

Take care with words like "dangerous". This SCP is pretty tame by Foundation standards, so I doubt that they would consider it worthy of the descriptor.

I already know the narrative I want to convey with this SCP. My problem is that I wasn't sure how to construct the narrative - I mainly relied on the Series I as a reference for style. Reading the style for SCP-3092 has already given me some ideas on how to restructure my article, however.

The core concept of this SCP is that it is a partially haunted statue of a hit-and-run victim, and the song that was selected was specifically one that the victim was listening to when he died. I feel like I haven't provided enough detail.

Edit: I only clicked one of your links by mistake before responding! Do you have any advice on how to improve my clinical tone?

Well, there you have it! If you can convey that narrative powerfully enough, I think you'll have a solid article. Make sure you get some feedback from other people for your next version before posting.

After coming back to this draft in a moment of spare time, I retract a previous statement that, to me now, seems to imply that I think this article will have main list potential without a lot of serious revision. I do not believe any such thing. There are major weaknesses in the central concept and narrative that cannot be easily remedied: lack of intrigue, ghost story cliches, and the relative mundanity of a hit-and-run victim.

I was a first-time SCP writer on this site nearly exactly a year ago, and I remember what it's like to get attached to a first idea. However, the best thing I ever did here was deleting my first SCP attempt and going back to the drawing board. It gave me a lot of good formatting practice, but it was conceptually terrible and unoriginal. Your core concept in this "Quiet Garden" draft is better than my first idea by leagues — but it's still something that will be very very difficult to pull off in an impactful enough way that it will be a good SCP.

While I'm a firm believer that almost any concept, no matter how seemingly bland or impossible to pull off, can be made to work in the right hands, I also acknowledge that a draft of this sort is most certainly not what a new author should start with. I want to say for your benefit right now that you should either scrap this idea or save it for the future once you've gotten some more experience under your belt.

I highly suggest that you go to the Ideas and Brainstorming forum with new, different concepts. You'll be much better off as an author if your stories have a base that works with you rather than against you.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing clinically is the difference between what you know and what you can only assume.

You know: physical measurements/characteristics (dimensions, material, etc.), statistical facts (the item explodes in 70% of all testing), and anecdotes/past events (the discovery occurred on this date and this happened).

You can only assume: absolutes (the item has always/never been observed to do this), motivations/feelings (the anomaly appeared distressed/exhibited signs of distress), and speculation (it seems likely that the anomaly will one day do this/is connected to this other thing).

In other words, scientists don't say "the sun will rise tomorrow morning", they say "all evidence indicates that the sun will rise tomorrow morning."

It's important to know that this doesn't mean you should use phrases like "appears/seems to be" in place of "is" whenever a situation contains an element of uncertainty. In most cases, there's a wide variety of ways to completely circumvent the need for "is/are" verbs and related substitutes. The following example should outline this:

Non-clinical: The anomaly (is trying)/(wants) to cooperate with Foundation personnel.